Cisco's New Data Center Architecture

Earlier this week Cisco Systems (CSCO) announced a significant expansion of its data center product and services portfolio, including new blade servers, racktop switches and fabric extenders for its Unified Computing System (UCS).

Earlier this week Cisco Systems (CSCO) announced a significant expansion of its data center product and services portfolio. The company introduced Unified Network Services, which are designed to deliver any network service in any environment and in any form factor, and also announced new blade servers, racktop switches and fabric extenders for its Unified Computing System (UCS).

Here's a roundup of some of the analysis and commentary from around the Web

Cisco addresses virtualized datacenter security - David Chernicoff at ZDNet: With the most recent announcements, Cisco takes the additional important step of adding flexible virtualized security to their existing virtual machine deployment and management tools.

Raising the Bar Again on Data Center Switching - The Cisco Data Center Blog: "At the foundation of this architectural framework are three pillars — Unified Fabric , Unified Computing and new third architectural pillar Unified Network Services (UNS)," writes Cisco's Kash Shaikh. "We also announced key Innovations across the data center portfolio in each of these pillars."

Cisco adds slim blade with fat memory to UCS - ChannelRegister: The new B230-M1 aims to give customers who can afford to pay a premium for Xeon 6500 or 7500 chips a different option, which is a half-width blade that has 32 DDR3 memory slots. That's not quite as much as the 48 memory slots in the fat B250 series blades, but the 256 GB supported on the new B230 blade is going to be suitable for a number of customers with heavy memory demands.

Cisco slots new blade into UCS portfolio - SearchDataCenter.com: Cisco touts the B230 M1 as a good fit for high-performance, transaction-intensive applications, such as single-threaded database applications, said Todd Brannan, Cisco's senior marketing manager for data center solutions. Those applications may or may not run on top of virtualization - an intriguing fit for a platform that Cisco has been pitched as a natural complement to virtualization.

For more on the new proiducts, this video from Soni Jiandani, Cisco Vice President Server and Virtualization Business Unit, provides an overview of the expansion of capabilities within the Cisco Nexus family of data center switching : Nexus 5500, Nexus 2000, Nexus 7000 and Nexus 1000v.